By the end of the spring, however, that won’t be an option as the city’s longtime lab director, Alfred Kao, will be retiring.

“I’ve been here too long,” Kao said with a laugh during an interview Wednesday. “In this 40 years, we went from pens and paper to computerized.”

Forty-three years ago, Kao joined the department and became a “jack of all trades.” He ran the public health department’s lab, which included certifications as a microbiologist and specialist microbiologist from the National Registry of Microbiologists. During that time, he also built the entire network system for the department, as a certified Novell engineer.

“We’re going to miss Al for so many reasons — he’s a skilled lab director, he’s always been an incredible source of help with our IT support,” said Theresa Argondezzi, health educator for the department. “You can tell his personality is pretty awesome too, but also (he has) that historical perspective on how much the city has changed, how much our department has changed.”

For Kao, he’s seen almost everything — from the shift to technology to seeing public health departments have their funding cut and services change.

“At one point, at one peak of the time, we had a whole lab, I mean we could do a cancer screening, we could do a diabetic test, every test would run in this lab but as time goes, federal governments cut down their budgets they cut down so we are going down, from more, more, more to now it’s a minimum,” he said.

The one good change he said he’s grateful for is the shift to computerization from pen and paper.

“I feel that technology changed a lot but it’s changing for better nowadays,” he said, adding things are “more efficient.”

But the city won’t just miss Kao for his knowledge and personality. Since he’s been the director for so long, he holds the licenses to operate the services offered. The city’s laboratory offers testing in clinical settings, such as health for STDs and environmental, such as for beach water contamination.

“Certain tests have to be under qualified licensing — me,” Kao said. “Now I’m leaving this place, so now we have to — we went and figured out how we could make our laboratory and our clinic still running at full function, as well.”

Kao has handed off some of his responsibilities as he has moved to a part-time role over the last few years. His IT support has been turned over to the city’s IT department. His longtime laboratory technician, Patricia DiPietro, took over Kao’s environmental licenses to continue to run that side of the laboratory, which includes primarily beach water-quality testing, tick identification, rainwater samples and rabies processing.

The department has hired a part-time lab technician Kori Bria, to work with Kao to learn the clinical side of things.

Because neither holds all of the credentials Kao did, however, some of the lab’s offerings will be done off site.

“We’ll still be able to offer in the clinical setting the vast majority of the things that we’ve always offered, it’s just that some of the testing will have to be outsourced,” Argondezzi said.

The lab will move under the umbrella of the Connecticut State Lab, which will allow them to send certain tests, such as syphilis to the state, since no one will be licensed on site to complete them, she said.

“We did a lot of research, evaluated all the different scenarios, (including) the one being the lab goes away all together, which was something we didn’t want to happen, but this option to go under the state license after looking at all the options that were available seemed like the way we could maximum the services to the community without being too resource intensive,” she said.

Community members can still come to the clinic and have the same tests done, but some of the results will take a bit longer since they have to be processed off site.

The next step is making sure Bria is up to speed on Norwalk lab operations before Kao leaves, which he said he plans to do near the start of May.

“I know how to do mostly everything, it’s just a matter of learning how everyone does things here and different computer systems here and stuff like that,” said Bria, who used to work for the Stamford Public Health Department. “It’s been very smooth and everyone’s been very welcoming and helpful.”

That doesn’t mean that Kao won’t be missed, especially by those like DiPietro who has worked with him for about 30 years.

“This is a relationship I’ll be sad to not have that camaraderie that we have — lots of laughs, we laugh a lot,” she said. “It’ll be a tough transition I think.”

Still, DiPietro said her longtime friend and colleague deserves to kick back a little.

“I see it to be just another chapter and I want Al to relax,” she said. “He really has done a lot here and it’d be nice to see him just relax.”

Kao said he plans to do just that as he’ll be moving to Phoenix to be closer to one of his sons.

But he has one piece of advice for Bria.

“Kori, listen to her,” Kao said, pointing at DiPietro, with a smile. “You can argue with her later.”